April 27, 2009

How to dance the galop

One of the simplest couple dances of the nineteenth century was the galop (gallop, galopade, gallopade), which traveled from the ballrooms of continental Europe to those of England and American in the 1820s and 1830s, often as part of quadrilles or country dances. It was also -- by the middle of the century, predominantly -- a dance for individual couples, though it continued to appear in quadrille figures and occasional country dances throughout the nineteenth century. It is described in just about every surviving French, English, and American source for couple dancing from the mid-nineteenth century into the early years of the twentieth. I have cited a few of these in the text below; a complete bibliography would run multiple pages.

The galop is an aerobic dance done at a rapid pace. One of the few manuals to include tempo notes, M.B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) gives a tempo of 144 beats per minute
for the galop, as opposed to 116 beats per minute for the polka. La Danse
(Washington Lopp; Paris, 1903) agrees with those tempos (Lopp borrowed heavily from Gilbert) and adds 120 beats per minute for the two-step.

The Gallopade has had a long reign of nearly twenty years, and is
still in high favour at public balls in Paris, as well as at Jullien's bal
masqué in London. There is no dance more exciting, or easy to learn, it
requires only a good ear to mark the time of the music. The chief
requisite in this dance is to keep on one's feet, for there is great
danger if once you fall that you will have those who follow over you,
like the Capucins de Cartes. This power once acquired, you have only to
throw yourself in the volcanic tourbillon and fellow the course of the
stream, which with very little attention will be easily understood.

The Gallopade has recently been re-introduced in private society, where it is not customary to race as at a masquerade. They merely make a few steps of the galop
and pass into the valse à deux temps. In this way the gallopade becomes
a spirited and graceful dance instead of a tremendous rush.

The essential galop movement is a series of slides and "chasing" steps with half-turns interspersed. Most commonly found is the four-slide galop, performed in four bars as follows:

All slides are along the line of dance; the default turning direction is clockwise. The first set are performed with the first foot (gentleman's left, lady's right) with the second foot then closing behind in order to again slide with the first foot. The second series is then performed by sliding with the second foot and closing with the first. No hop is actually mentioned, though it does make turning easier if one hops slightly on the half-turn. Pointing the toe of the leading foot in the direction of travel is essential to avoid rolling (and spraining) the ankle. A stylish detail is to raise the free foot behind the other while turning, toe pointing straight down.

A longer version with eight slides is described in some earlier sources; each half would involve eight slides with seven closes interspersed before the half-turn. The entire sequence would take eight bars rather than four. This version is not found in any of my later sources (1880s-1900s).

In the diagram, the gentleman would be facing down the page and the lady up, so that their joined hands point along the line from left to right. The curve in the center represents the track of the gentleman's right foot as he makes the first half-turn; the curve at the end is the track of his left foot on the second half-turn. The "left foot" and "right foot" labels indicate which foot is leading (sliding) in each half.

It is also possible to do reverse (counter-clockwise) turns in the galop; Dodworth gives a diagram for this as well:

Again, the first curve represents the track of the gentleman's right foot and the second curve that of his left.

It's possible to switch directly from natural to reverse turns, but Dodworth recommends an easier method in which the dancers make a quarter-turn and the leader dances forward or backward for one measure before quarter-turning again to begin turning in the other direction. To go from a natural to a reverse turn, the sequence for the leader would be:

In both sequences, the lady is dancing opposite, as usual. Dodworth notes of the two-slide galop equally applicable to the second and fourth bars of the four-slide galop, that:

In practice, there will be found a tendency to distribute the turn upon all three motions [slide-close-slide], caused by the momentum of the whole person this ought not to be resisted unless there should be liability to turn more than is required. Evenness of motion is part of gracefulness. Brusque or sudden motions must be avoided at all costs.

There are few variations for the galop in the mid-nineteenth century; often manuals only give one version (two, four, or eight slides). But by the later decades of the century, dancing masters started to innovate. A suggestion from Dodworth is to vary the galop by alternating two-slide and four-slide galops as follows:

The second two-slide galop and the second four-slide galop will be started "over elbows" and with the gentleman leading with the right foot. Experienced dancers may recognize this as the pattern of the mid-nineteenth-century polka sequence called the Esmerelda and the early twentieth-century two-step sequence known as the Glide Two-Step (described here).

The other major variation for the galop was the zig-zagging racket, developed in the 1880s.

Music for a mid-nineteenth-century galop may be found on the Spare Parts CD, The Civil War Ballroom. There is ample surviving sheet music for the galop as well.